


8 Things You Should Know About Regulus Black

by irisdescence



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Brotherly Love, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Abuse, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Regulus Black Deserves Better, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26161183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdescence/pseuds/irisdescence
Summary: The world wants to crush him. He wants to let it.
Relationships: Regulus Black & Sirius Black
Comments: 6
Kudos: 96





	8 Things You Should Know About Regulus Black

**1\. His boggart is his mother.**

He had learned, from a very young age, to be afraid of physical contact. Most of it was his mother: sharp pinches for speaking out of turn, hits on the head when he wasn’t paying attention to his constant rotation of tutors, slaps from hands covered in heavy family rings that would someday belong to his brother. Not him, never him, _an heir and a spare._

The boggart that lived in the attic when he was seven turned into his mother, spitting and hissing and pulling out her wand, curved like a hippogriff talon, and _crucio, crucio._ His father would never strike the same amount of fear in him-- he was only harsh words and disapproving looks, cuffs on the back of the head, hours of lessons on purity, duty, loyalty.

 _Stand up straight. He needs to learn his lesson. Move before I make you. Toujours Pur._ These are the things Regulus knows, and staring down the mockery of his mother in the attic of Grimmauld Place, he knows fear, too, the way it settles deep into his gut like an accusation. 

**2\. When he was 14, he snuck out into Muggle London.**

It was the summer after Sirius ran away, and he had slipped out the front door and onto the street. A pair of trousers, a soft sweater. The lack of a robe made him feel vulnerable, open, but he kept his head high. _Blacks don’t fall. Blacks stay proud._

After a few hours of navigating the train system and getting delightfully lost in the maze of tall buildings and back alleys, he wound up at a skate rink. He ordered a milkshake (who knew there was something as delightful as sugar and vanilla ice cream in a cup?) and sat at a table in the corner, watching the Muggles on roller skates dance and laugh around the floor.

The lights were red and purple and glittering, glittering. The music pounded in his ears, in tandem with his heart. _I am, I am, I am._ For a moment he could pretend that he wasn’t Regulus Black at all, but someone else. Someone entirely unimportant. Someone whose heart didn’t feel like stone at the best of times.

**3\. He once tried to intervene when his mother was punishing Sirius.**

He couldn’t stop shaking for three days.

_Are you not a Black, Regulus? Do you enjoy seeing our family made a laughing stock? Is this what you want? To be no better than a filthy blood-traitor?_

Sirius was still on the floor, sobbing. The carpet was a delicate eighteenth century Persian rug dyed in colours so dark they could not possibly be cherries like his mother said, curses bound to each knotted thread. Her rings cut into his face and his nerves trembled with the aftershocks of the Cruciatus. He stood in the bathroom, over the sink, and stared at the blood dripping down, down his cheekbones. 

“I must say, you’ve looked better,” his reflection remarked.

He turned away.

**4\. He is afraid of water.**

The first nightmare he could ever remember having is of drowning.

Dark water and lungs full of not-air and choking, gasping, trying to break the surface. There is no peace in drowning, no silent death when sent to a watery grave. His tarot cards showed him the Hanged Man, the Suit of Cups, the Priestess, the Moon. The sea makes him sick. Baths want to swallow him whole and spit out the bones. The whole house stood on edge, waiting for him to slip up, saying _Give us a reason, give us a reason._

The boat ride to Hogwarts near made him cry. His hands kept a white-knuckled grip on the side of the boat the whole time as it wobbled across the pitch dark waves. Water is a dark and cold world, a bottomless pit of archaic notions in slow motion, a black hole into some unsorted dimension. Quiet, limitless, impassive.

Water dissolves everything he is, everything he was. He wants to become air. He wants to become air and never touch the earth again.

**5\. He cried when he got the Dark Mark.**

Not there, of course. He had knelt in front of the monster wearing a man’s skin, sixteen years old and shaking so hard he might fall apart, and held out his arm and pledged loyalty. _We reward the worthy, eliminate the weak._ His mother was so proud, his father so silent, and Sirius was gone.

Voldemort was a monster in the dark, under the bed: a suffocating terror, binding all the little flies tighter and tighter in webs of steel.

It was only later, in his room back at Grimmauld, buried under the cloying sheets of his childhood that he let himself cry. Not gently. Blacks never do anything gently. His tears stung and they burned and he wanted to become so small he would disappear. The mark on his arm (a brand, a brand) twisted and spun in the lantern light, dark ink against his skin. Regulus was nine and sitting in his father’s study listening to him say _Blacks don’t kneel,_ but they do now. They do now.

The world wants to crush him. He wants to let it.

**6\. He started growing his hair out after Sirius ran away.**

He’d always kept it short, shorn neatly, slicked back away from his face. All sharp lines and harsh edges. Sirius was the one who’d grown it out, let it tumble over his shoulders and refuse to tie it back or up, blackberry tangles around his face.

But Sirius had stepped through the green flames to his brother in all but blood, and his brother in blood was left to watch his mother burn his name from the tapestry with the tip of her wand, and he was not the spare anymore, he was the heir, and he was an only child.

_You were always the better son. I know you won’t break my heart, Regulus. Your brother is a disappointment to our name. You are the heir I always wanted._

His mother’s words echoed like ashes on a wind round and round his head. He wished he could swallow all the ugly in the world, a reverse Pandora’s box, letting the evil settle into his vocal cords so that when he spoke only hope would come out. He stared down the mirror. He let his hair grow.

**7\. His worst-kept secret is that he loves his older brother.**

He _shouldn’t_ , he knows. Sirius is-- _a blood traitor, a Gryffindor, a Light wizard, filth, stain on the family._ But Sirius is his _brother._ His big brother who had let him crawl into his bed when he was having nightmares, who was there to coax him out of his cocoon of blankets when the shouting and smashing and fighting was over, whispering quiet words and fierce apologies. Because Sirius had been fierce, yes. The brightest star in the sky, so _brave,_ so fearless in the face of curses and hateful vitriol alike.

Regulus had entered Hogwarts as a wide-eyed fawn, starstruck and wobbling, and when the Hat had been lifted off his head and he’d met Sirius’s eyes from across the hall, his brother had looked away, and Regulus’s heart sank. His house mates spoke of mudbloods and purity, of justice, of oppression. Familiar to Regulus, who grew up running fingers over the Black family tapestry, who grew up on visions of glory and family pride.

But he joined Quidditch, and he did it so Sirius would look at him. He soared high, high above the crowds, searching, searching for that tiny fleck of gold against the endless blue cotton of the sky. The Seeker is such a lonely role, all grandeur and no teamwork, but he soared, and Sirius did too.

The truth is this: Regulus loved Sirius, and it destroyed him.

**8\. His funeral is cold.**

It takes place in February, two months after he goes missing. The Black family cemetery is out near Cardiff, centuries and centuries of bodies tucked away under the earth. Stars fallen, gone out. Dust to dust.

Regulus had died standing on the edge of a precipice, heart overflowing with regret and all the things he could not say. He saw his brother, proud and shining. He saw the light, so blinding, wishing that it could take him and cut him out in little stars and place him in the sky. The water made him burn and the ghosts of all that had been dragged him down, down, down.

There is no body to bury.

And when Sirius dies, there is no body either. _Blacks never die,_ their mother had said. A lesson well learned, over and over. Family history tied to the threads of the tapestry, interwoven, green and silver. _Blacks never die._

But their mother had been such a good liar. 

Blacks always die. 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](https://sleepmotel.tumblr.com/)  
> thanks for reading <3


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